Psychology undergraduate students,
UBC psychology faculty would like your feedback on a new course that is currently under development by the Psychology Curriculum Committee. Research and lab experience is a key component of an undergraduate student’s experience in psychology at UBC — and a pre-requisite for graduate school in the field. Each year, psychology labs have hundreds of students volunteering their time, doing research alongside faculty, graduate students, and post-docs. At the same time, many students who are unable to volunteer as research assistants, whether for personal or financial reasons, are excluded from a key experience in their psychology education at UBC.
The Department of Psychology is hoping to address this gap in several ways. Today, we are asking for your feedback on a proposed second-year research experience course that would allow students to join a psychology lab for course credit. This course and its structure is still being developed, and there are many details that are still not finalized, but as things stand students who have completed either PSYC 101 or 102 would be eligible to join (no GPA minimums or additional pre-reqs would be required) by submitting a form on a website that would indicate which labs are recruiting for the course.
Students would indicate their interest in 3-4 of the labs and then be matched to them. Then the student and the lab would agree on the number of hours per week, which would then translate to credits (in a ratio of 4-5h/week for each 1 credit). Students could flexibly choose the number of credits/hours they would do in up to two semesters. The course would also require students to write short monthly reflection journals. We are hoping to make it a pass/fail course, rather than graded on a scale.
Although we understand that you may have many questions about the fine print details of how the course would work, for now we are hoping for a more general sense of whether a course like this would be something students are interested in general, and we will use your feedback to further tailor the specifics of the course afterwards.
Here is the link to a short, 2-3 minute course survey on this proposed course: https://tinyurl.com/2bt3bwxf
We would like many undergrad psychology majors to share their feedback, whether they are interested in this course or not, and even if you are in your third- or fourth-year (in this case, you would be asked to indicate whether a course like this would have been valuable in your Psychology Major had it been offered when you were in second year). This will help us understand: (a) the general interest in a course like this; (b) the barriers students typically experience when asked to volunteer their time; and (c) potential barriers students feel might prevent them from taking a course like the one we are proposing.
We hope to hear from you and we thank you for your participation in the survey!